The Leadership Japan Series Podcast By Dr. Greg Story cover art

The Leadership Japan Series

The Leadership Japan Series

By: Dr. Greg Story
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 Leading in Japan is distinct and different from other countries. The language, culture and size of the economy make sure of that. We can learn by trial and error or we can draw on real world practical experience and save ourselves a lot of friction, wear and tear. This podcasts offers hundreds of episodes packed with value, insights and perspectives on leading here. The only other podcast on Japan which can match the depth and breadth of this Leadership Japan Series podcast is the Japan's Top Business interviews podcast.© 2022 Dale Carnegie Training. All Rights Reserved. Economics Management Management & Leadership
Episodes
  • The Listening Leader

    The Listening Leader
    Jul 9 2025
    Leaders are often poor listeners in the modern age. To listen to our team members requires the allocation of precious time. Advances in technology, especially hand held devices, was trumpeted as unfurling access to more time for contemplative pursuits and work-life balance. Is there anyone out there who feels they are now more ebullient, because of all the extra time the technology has thrown our way? Probably not. In fact, as the pace of life has sped up, we are more time poor than ever. The mobile phone has become addictive and we are reaching for it almost every second of the day. We carry it around, we keep it close and we are plugged in 24/7. Leaders are probably the most time poor in society and so interactions with our team members becomes more and more transactional. We want something from them in exchange for salary. We want that report, that update, that meeting and then we rush to the next thing on our To Do list. If we clocked how much time we spend we each day coaching our people, the results would be preposterously bad. Developing our people is one of the key tasks of the leader. How can you develop people if you have little clue as to what is happening in their life? Japan is especially tricky, because staff don’t share much about their private lives with their colleagues or the boss. For example, if someone is getting married, they keep it a secret until it is a done deal, so there is no possibility of the marriage plans falling over and them losing face. This means as the boss, we need to make a bigger effort to engage our staff and understand what are the key things in their lives. We need to see where we can help them advance their careers. But time poor people struggle with this. I know myself, I have never been busier. When things are going well you are busy fulfilling client orders. When things are bad, you are busy trying to get client orders. There is no rest. Everyone working from home has made the whole communication piece more challenging as a leader. My time poor status has been elevated even more negatively by the pandemic and its impact on business. As bosses, we imagine we are listening to our staff, because we are too optimistic about our time allocations and priorities. In fact, we are giving orders, checking on details and coordinating efforts across the team. This is not listening, because the direction tends to be one way. “Aye, aye captain” as a response from our staff is not communication. It is a passive response to our barrage of demands. There are different levels of listening and if we are not careful we can get stuck down the bottom of the hierarchy, at pretend or selective listening. With ideas, thoughts, decisions buzzing around inside our brains, like a lot of bees on speed, we can miss what is going on around us. People are telling us things, but we have not been able to break away from the thoughts occupying our minds. Instead, we make sounds that appear to indicate we are listening, but actually we are in the pretend listening phase. Or we may be filleting the white noise emanating from our staff member and seeking only the most highly relevant bits, ignoring the rest. It as if instead of speed reading, we are speed listening, skimming through the conversation, picking out the plums and discarding the rest. We want to move up the scale to attentive listening and empathetic listening. I used to work with a younger colleague who would continue looking at his computer screen and keep typing, while you were talking to him. After suffering from that bizarre and unnerving experience, I made a commitment. Whenever people want to speak with me, I need to physically prop the keyboard up on my desk, turn my head to face them and look straight into their eyes, giving them my 100% attention. I need to be fully present for what they want to say to me and do no filtering. I need to relax and really listen to what they are saying and also think about what they are not saying. Empathetic listening is extremely difficult, if you don’t make the time to speak with the team members. We need to know what is going on in their life. The only way to do that is to leap off the leader rat treadmill and spend time with them. We need to take a leaf from the slow food movement. We need an equivalent slow leadership movement, if we want to really hear our staff. Slow down with people to understand their perspective, their emotions and their thinking. We are listening with our hearts, eyes and ears to hear their needs. They are not making as many Japanese as they used to, so we will all be locked in a struggle to the death to recruit and retain staff. It is a zero sum game. If you cannot keep the right people and your competitor can, then they can put you out of business. The boss ability to listen at the empathetic level is going to reflect the type of culture and environment, where people feel ...
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    12 mins
  • The Awesome Power Of The Leader

    The Awesome Power Of The Leader
    Jul 2 2025
    We have met them. Thrusters, mad with power and hungry to control others. Organisation insider politicians who spend all of their time sucking up to the powerful, while lobbying for themselves to be granted more and more status and authority. The absolute nobody, who controls approval processes and who milks it for all it is worth. The psychologically damaged and emotionally stunted intent on making our life hell, now that they have been promoted. The mixture of leaders and power can be a powerful tonic and it can also be a toxic cocktail. Let’s take a look at five power constructs for leaders. Have you worked for any of these bosses? Which amongst these are you? Authority power is the absolute refuge of scoundrels. They have nothing going for them individually, but they have three stripes on their sleeve and we have none, so they can control our lives. They flaunt their position power and try to suppress everyone under them. They often hate their job and take it out on everyone they can bully. There has to be hierarchy in organisations and there has to be compliance with policies. Leaders are there to make sure that happens but some take it way beyond the original intention. Coercive power is nuclear brute force unleashed on anyone who questions the leader’s position, direction, policies, actions or who they decide they don’t want or don’t like. When the status title or the three stripes doesn’t impress subordinates, or when they feel threatened, then the scoundrel morphs into the demon. This is often the leader parachuted into the organisation from outside, who starts looking around for people to disappear. They want to build their own crew of cut throats who will follow and support them. They use all the power of the machine against you and there is very little recourse. The infamous Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) is their favoured bludgeon of choice with which to eject you out of the organisation. Expert Power describes those with capability, knowledge, experience, intellect and expertise. They are very smart and accordingly can command genuine respect. We look up to them as a superior being in their field of speciality. They are completely confident within themselves and so have no need to belittle others or flaunt their big brains. They are magnets for attracting followers and fans. Reward power is the ability to garner followers by buying them off. Transactional relationships abound. “I do this for you, so you need to do this for me”. “If you don’t do what I say, you will miss out”. Flunkies, yes-men, sycophants, toadies and lickspittles flourish. They use the power of awarding promotions to favour nasties like themselves. As patrons they demand total loyalty and so they trail these minions with them ever upward through the hierarchy, in order to bolster their own positions. Role model power is the knight on the white charger. They have charisma, integrity, vision and attract support from followers who wish they could be like them. They have expertise like those with expert power and are respected because they can project their capacity beyond specialist knowledge. They have tremendous EQ, human relations skills and are excellent communicators. As leaders we are sometimes all of these types. We need authority to get things done, especially when our subordinates don’t agree with the policy or decision. Not everyone is engaged with the direction the organisation is going and sometimes we have to coerce them to toe the line, whether they agree with the direction or not. Hopefully we have real expertise in key areas, which justify the trust placed in us by the organization. We need to reward good performance and encourage others to do more and make even bigger efforts. We should be the role model for the team. We are doing our best to grow our bench strength, so we are coaching others and investing in their career trajectories. I am sure we have all seen megalomania gone mad in leaders. Equally, we have also met leaders who are truly impressive. How are you seen by your subordinates? The Johari Window talks about our leadership blindspots. We can’t see our own faults but they are visible to our staff. What can you do to investigate your blindspots? How open are you to painful feedback on your behaviour? What about all of those grossly unfair statements you read in the 360 degree feedback document? What are you going to do about them? As the American philosopher Yogi Berra famously noted, “Leading is easy. It is getting people to follow you which is the hard part”.
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    11 mins
  • To SER With Love

    To SER With Love
    Jun 25 2025
    To SER With Love In the movie “To Sir, With Love”, Sidney Poitier was brilliant in the role of a black teacher in a tough London East End high school. He was trying to make a difference for these young outcasts to better prepare them for the life they would face after graduating from school. A very uplifting story about what is possible when we encourage others to be their best. So what has this got to do with business, you may be asking? As leaders, we have four jobs. Run the machinery of the operation so everything works well, provide the vision on where we are going, explain the WHY and build our people. This “build our people” part is a communications exercise which most leaders fail to do well enough, myself included. Many of us grew up in business in a era when your boss just expected you to get on with your job. No encouragement was needed, because you were required to do a full day’s work for a full day’s pay. Praise didn't exist and you found your own sources of encouragement. Things are different today, but are we skilled enough in the best practice techniques of giving honest praise and encouragement? This is where the acronym SER comes in. “S” is strength, “E” is for evidence and “R” for relevance. It is a useful formula to remember when you want recognize the good work done by one of your team. “Strengths” are interesting because most bosses are laser beam focused on identifying weaknesses and fixing them. They are “error finders” as opposed to “good work finders”, when looking at how people carry out their tasks. They are searching for defects, time delays, poor quality, unsatisfactory performance, cost overruns and basic idiocy. If we switch our mindset and look for strengths, then we completely change how we see our people. That automatically changes how we communicate with them. Now words strung together like “good job” are a complete waste of time. Please - don’t even bother saying them. The person on the receiving end is fully aware they are doing many things in their work, but still have no clear idea which particular bit they are doing well. We need to be highly specific about which aspect of their work we are recognizing. This is how our words have impact. “Evidence” is critical to demonstrate that the boss has been paying attention and has noticed good work is being performed. By referring to specific actions, decisions, outputs etc., the staff member knows the words coming out of their boss’s mouth are real and not flattery, propaganda or an attempt to snow them into believing the boss is nicer than they really are. Every piece of work is made up of separate tasks, so the idea is to select a particular task that was done well and single it out for praise. You could say, “Greg, good work on the report”. Or you could say, “Greg, thank you for your work on the proposal for the client. That was one of the best I have seen. You assembled the evidence very comprehensively and you argued the case very convincingly. I am sure the client was impressed by the professional level of the work they received from you”. It is obvious which one we want to receive. So, if it so obvious, why aren’t we communicating our feedback like this? “Relevancy” is a key step that 99% of bosses who do manage to offer some praise and recognition completely fail to mention. We have to recognize the work, offer our evidence to make the praise credible and then take it one important step further. We need to link the good work being done to the bigger picture. That can be for the firm’s future, but it is much more powerful if it is linked to WIIFM. “What’s In It For Me” is a powerful driver of employee self-interest. The secret is to select that piece of excellent work and then link it to how that is going to help that person succeed in their business and career. For example, “ Greg, your ability to source key data and then back it up with clear, concise language is a real skill. That is the type of skill our company values highly. It also means that you can have impact in your current role. This is the calibre of person we want to make a future leader in our organization. I know you are working hard and keep going with what you are doing, because you are differentiating yourself in a powerful and positive way. This will be a big help to you in your career”. If you are hearing that comment, you are going to be fired up to try even harder and push even further. “Greg, good job” pales in comparison doesn’t it. Even worse, when nothing has been said at all, because working hard is expected around here, there has clearly been a major lost opportunity to engage your team members. What is required? That most valuable of all resources – “boss time”. We have to make the time to become “good finders” and then take the time to communicate it using the SER ...
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    11 mins
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